Night landscape photography tips

What are the techniques and methods for creating beautiful scenery at night? The following are my nighttime landscape photography tips, welcome to refer to them!

1. Take good steps in advance

Take advantage of the sufficient light during the day and choose the shooting location in advance. If you shoot directly at night, it will definitely be time-consuming and laborious. Not only should the view be beautiful, but safety should also be ensured. Most of the good scenery is in the suburbs, so you have to find a convenient place to park. Also note that if you need to break into other people’s yards or fields in order to find a good shooting angle, you should say hello in advance~

The further away from the city, the easier it is to take good photos of natural scenery. Try to avoid the lights in urban areas so that you can take pictures of bright stars and moon, and use slow shutter speed to bring out color tones that are difficult to distinguish with the naked eye.

2. Bring all your things

"The body is the capital of photography." You must first ensure your physical health before you can think carefully about taking good photos. Although the weather is very hot now, the temperature difference between morning and evening is still quite large, so it is best to bring a jacket and wear socks. If it is other seasons, you should pay more attention to keeping warm.

A tripod is indispensable when shooting night scenes. When shooting landscapes, use a wide-angle lens. You can also bring different lenses according to your personal preferences. It's a good idea to bring a spare battery.

In addition, bring some light sources and use a high-intensity flashlight to illuminate the foreground to help the camera focus accurately; you can also use LED lights to adjust the exposure, but the wattage of the lights should not be too high, and you must also pay attention Color temperature and illumination angle to avoid damaging the overall atmosphere of the picture.

3. Framing and composition

Due to the serious lack of ambient light, all you can see through the viewfinder with the naked eye is pitch black. You can first take a long exposure test shot to determine the surrounding environment and design the composition. For example, first take a picture with a shutter speed of 30 seconds. Even though the photo is still dark, it is much brighter than what you see with the naked eye. You can see the general outline of the surrounding scenery and adjust the composition.

One of the charms of nighttime landscape photography lies in the interesting tones, colors and textures of clouds in the sky. They are different every day and every hour. They are unpredictable but will always bring you surprises. . It is most beautiful when there are clouds in the sky, especially the photos of floating clouds taken after long exposure. So, it’s best to leave more space in the sky. If you ask me "how long the exposure time is needed", I will tell you, longer ~ because the clouds do not flow very fast, and there is no need to worry about overexposure in the extremely low ambient light at night.

In addition, pay attention to placing the stars or moon in the appropriate position in the sky to make the night sky more beautiful. For your photos to be eye-catching, you need an interesting foreground. For example, an old barn, a dead tree with a sense of vicissitude, or a meandering stream.

4. Start shooting!

The most important thing is to ensure that the subject is in focus. Turn on a flashlight to illuminate the subject and help the camera focus automatically. If you use manual focus, it is difficult to ensure that the subject is very clear because the light is too dark for the human eye to see clearly. Alternatively, you can focus on another brighter object, such as the horizon, a distant light, or sometimes even a bright star.

Regarding long exposure, you need to set the camera to bulb mode and freely control the exposure time by manually controlling the opening and closing of the shutter. Depending on the specific lighting conditions, shutter speeds generally range from two to three minutes to fifteen minutes. Only long exposure can capture colors that are invisible to the naked eye, and can brighten stars and clouds. Generally speaking, we will adjust the ISO to the lowest 100, but due to the long exposure time, the photo may still form noise (mainly thermal noise).

So, try to save photos in RAW format in the early stage, so that you have more room to adjust exposure and noise reduction in the later stage.